The “Slide” metaphor is about the role that inertia plays in burnout (creative, physical, emotional, and spiritual). When you create a system (think something like a fuel injection system), and you “start” it, the system requires some sort of anti-inertia (like brakes) to stop its forward motion.
Similarly, when you create the system of your life (ignition would have been birth, and you’ve been tapping the gas and the brakes alternately, but mostly, it’s been highway driving), you start the system of your choices moving, and those choices create automatic and habitual behaviors (not the same thing… all habitual behaviors are automatic, but not all automatic behaviors are habits… breathing, for instance, is automatic but not habitual because habitual behaviors required conscious choice at some point and breathing does not). The inertia of those consistent choices (especially those that you have either started early, or that have been going inside your brain for many years) is significant.
Breaking free of that inertia requires a massive energy boost to the “brakes”.
Let’s take one particular example.
Eating sugar.
Many of us have gone through periods of “fasting” from various forms of sugar for short (or long) periods of time. But many of us have habitual behaviors that make us reach for sugar. The inertia to stop the “habitual” behavior of reaching for sugar might take replacing the habit with another habit. But if your behavior is automatic (i.e. governed by your subconscious, and not your conscious choices), then the inertia to stop that level of choice is going to require significantly more energy to the “brakes” to make it stop.
The level of habitual inertia vs. automatic inertia is something that I am **constantly** listening for when I teach. Because if your “habitual” choices (let’s say, reaching for your phone first thing in the morning) have become an “automatic” choice (when you try to stop reaching for your phone first thing, you have actual withdrawal symptoms), then we’re in a totally different type of territory.
Let’s keep using the example of the phone in the morning.
If your derailing behavior is coming from a Strength area (say, Input’s desire to be informed, or Relator/Responsibility/Empathy/Connectedness desire to see how your important people are, or Significance’s hit of impact with people who matter), then that part of it (the core strong personality traits) is already automatic. So automatic that you could do it without thinking.
For instance, my Input is so high, I often start looking things up or collecting things or filing them without even realizing what I’ve done. Not that I’m distracted, but that the desire to be informed is so strong, I’ve learned how to quickly indulge it without a lot of impact to the rest of the day.
But if you have habitual behaviors at the core of reaching for the phone that aren’t automatic (you’ve become used to checking Facebook or your email or your messages or the news), then that’s a much easier pattern to break. Then, I would be okay with trying “no phone first thing” as your One Thing you’ll promise to execute after class is over.
So, that’s why I “listen” to you process so much in class. I’m looking for signals about just how deep the well goes.
Part of the difficulty with talking about burnout is that there’s a component of it that will always be inevitable, because we’re not aware of our own habitual or automatic inertia. This is where the “Slide” metaphor becomes relevant.
When our plates are too full, most of us are in that place because of such overwhelming inertia, it’s hard for us to put a stop to the slide down into the pit of burnout. We are going so fast in our life system’s inertia, we don’t see there’s a slide coming, and even if we put the “brakes” on, the ice is so slick under the wheels, there’s no traction to stop and even though the tires aren’t moving, we have so used all of our energy stores, our car just keeps sliding, even with no tire movement, down into the black cloud of burnout.
To learn more, check out the QuitCast episode on the Slide into burnout.